


Inferno

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Disfigurement, F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Obsession, Phasma Lives, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-01 00:35:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20249233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Phasma survives the wreckage of the Supremacy. Kylo Ren takes a keen personal interest in her recovery.





	Inferno

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).

They bring her through the airlock in a medical evac pod, mouth and nose covered by a heavy duty breathing mask. The coverage is probably for the best. Kylo sees what the flames of the Supremacy’s wreckage have done to the rest of her face, and his first numb thought as the sight sinks in is: _ now I’ll never know. _

He’s often wondered what Phasma was hiding behind her chrome shell. Stormtroopers don’t show their faces in front of a superior officer, and so asking her to remove her helmet for him would have sent an egalitarian message completely at odds with his intentions. Now the features that might once have been beautiful are burned away, mutilated beyond the help of bacta or reconstructive surgery. The evac pod is hermetically sealed, but he knows fire too well not to taste the phantom whiff of burnt flesh in the back of his throat.

There are worse fates than burning. Kylo should know – he burns every day and it hasn’t killed him yet. He’s burning now, his soul charred with rage like Crait’s blackened salt flats in the aftermath of a hollow triumph. His fleet is in disarray. Many of his best people are dead, not to mention an untold number of runners-up. He’s claimed the power that’s rightfully his, but already he senses the whispers and schemes of those who would steal it for themselves. The girl he offered the galaxy to has sworn herself his enemy, corrupted by Skywalker’s treacherous lies and her own weak-minded cowardice. 

With the help of the mask, Phasma breathes. Clings to life. The scars will be bad and the pain will be worse, but she’ll survive.

Kylo knows what that’s like, too.

* * *

‘Hux thinks he deserves to take my place,’ he confides in her, sitting by the bedside in a private ward of the medical centre. Her monitors beep at a slow, steady rate, and a med droid feeds a steady numbing trickle through her intravenous tube. ‘He thinks that with Snoke gone, he should be the one to lead the First Order. He doesn’t realise I can see the treason brewing in his thoughts.’

Right now, while she’s calm and pliant from the meds, seems as good a time as any to remind her about that facet of his powers. Not a threat and not a cause for panic. Just something she might like to keep in mind.

‘He doesn’t realise I know about all the other rivals he’s deposed,’ Kylo goes on. ‘All those accidents and mysterious deaths in his chain of command. Of course, some were more mysterious than others. The cleanest hits were the ones you helped him with. I always admired the way you got rid of old Brendol – dissolving his body like that was genius.’

A long pause. ‘Thank you for your feedback,’ Phasma rasps at last, through vocal cords only half-healed from the flames.

‘You don’t have to talk,’ Kylo reassures her. He can only imagine how much it must hurt to produce those small sounds. ‘How’s your pain? Should I tell the droid to increase your analgaesic levels?’

Stoic as always, Phasma shakes her head. 

He increases the levels anyway, and stays for a while as she drifts off to sleep on a cloud of narcosis. She’s awful to look at, with her hair burnt away and her skin grown back in webs and gnarls of thick scar tissue. But her cheekbones sit high and her jawline is sharp, and her body stretches long and lean beneath the thermal sheets. His instincts were right – once, before the injury, she would have been beautiful.

* * *

‘I need your approval,’ Hux says, sliding his datapad across the desk into Kylo’s reach. His voice drips with oil. ‘For an ordinary promotion, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on your time with such trivial personnel matters. But given the rank and the high-level clearance this vacancy requires–’

Kylo recognises the candidate's name. It’s one of Hux’s loyal faction, the hand-picked men he’s taken into confidence on his traitorous plans. ‘There is no vacancy,’ he interrupts, pushing the datapad back to its owner. ‘Phasma is alive and recovering, and she’s eager to resume her duties once her treating physician gives her the all clear. We don’t need a new captain.’

‘Supreme Leader,’ Hux wheedles. ‘It’s my dearest wish to have Phasma back among us. But given the extent of her injuries, it seems highly unlikely that she’ll ever be fit to resume an active combat role. I’m sure she would rest easier knowing that a competent replacement was–’

‘No,’ says Kylo. It seems he was premature in trying to warn Phasma not to side with Hux against him – she’s his whether she wants to be or not, discarded at first convenience by the man she helped raise to his current rank. The stab of empathy is so sharp it hurts. He knows how it feels to be cast aside like garbage once your skills have served someone else’s purpose.

He visited her earlier on his way to the command room. Her new retinal implants have repaired the damage to her vision, and the droids have been able to reduce her analgaesic dose to almost nothing. She’s gaining strength. Recovering alertness. Her blue eyes sparkle with brand new clarity.

‘Supreme Leader–’

‘You’re dismissed, Hux.’

Hux leaves fuming with his datapad clutched in his white-knuckled hand. His thwarted rage neither bothers Kylo nor particularly amuses him. He's busy thinking about Phasma, and how strange it is that fate saved her from the flames that have consumed everything else in his life. He doesn’t know what it means, yet. But he has his suspicions.

* * *

She's sitting up in bed when he enters the ward. He asks her how she feels. She asks him for her helmet.

‘It was destroyed,’ Kylo tells her. ‘If it had been intact, you wouldn’t have burned the way you did. They had to cut away what was left of it to treat your wounds.’

‘It could be remade,’ says Phasma. ‘If we still have the metal–’

‘We don’t.’

Her features twist like melting wax. Damaged skin pulls tight around the corners of her mouth and furrows above the hairless ridge of her brow. After a long silent moment, she says: ‘I’ll wear something else. New armour. A new start. Standard-issue white if I have to.’

‘Phasma,’ says Kylo, and infuses his voice with the subtle, soothing authority of the Force. ‘You don’t have to hide your face.’

He doesn’t need the Force to recognise the emotions churning inside her: shame, revulsion, anger, self-loathing. He knows them intimately. ‘I’m disgusting,’ she says in the hoarse whisper that her new post-burn voice has settled into. ‘Disfigured. I barely even look human.’

‘Mm.’ Kylo will be the first to admit to his many moral flaws, but dishonesty has never been one of them. ‘You look a bit like Snoke.’

She stares at him. Her eyeballs are like blue stars in her ruined face. _ Beautiful_, Kylo thinks, surprising himself. Phasma laughs a husky laugh that sounds almost like a sob and says: ‘Well, I suppose you’d know. You were closer to him than anyone.’ A meaningful pause, and through the haze of despair, he sees some shrewd part of her raise its head. ‘His trusted apprentice and natural successor.’

He’s seen no reason yet to disclose that Hux has already thrown her over and effectively robbed her of the choice about her future loyalties. She doesn’t know that her implied pledge is an empty one – but after all the rejections and betrayals he’s endured, Kylo appreciates it anyway. ‘Snoke taught me the strength I needed to stand in his place when the time came. He also taught me that scars are war trophies, not blemishes to hide. You’ll notice I’ve thrown my own mask away too.’

Phasma snorts. ‘Yes, how very courageous to show a face like yours. All the sighing and swooning must wear horribly on your patience.’

Her tone is sarcastic, and maybe that’s why the compliment doesn’t register until long after Kylo has left her ward. But luckily he’s alone when it hits, because without his mask, he has no way to hide the heat that rises to his cheeks. Undignified, for one in his position. It’s better that she sees only the strongest parts of him as she reaches for comfort in her darkest, weakest hour.

* * *

'I'm sure you have more important duties to tend to than me,' she tries telling him.

And: 'Supreme Leader, I'm no use to you in my current state. You've already shown me more kindness than I deserve.'

And: 'The droids can do it. These menial nursing chores are beneath you.'

And: 'Please, Ren, I just want to be alone.'

Kylo stands fast through all her protests. He can feel the shame that makes her push him away, the disgust when she glimpses her reflection, the deep-seated fear of being obsolete and helpless. She begs him to leave her alone with the pain, and instead he stays close and mops her brow and adjusts her bed until she's as comfortable as his efforts can make her.

_ Beautiful_, he finds himself thinking more and more often as he watches her convalesce. The thought is an intrusive one, a whisper in a quiet room. Her scar tissue is fine lace like a spider’s silk stretched in webs across her face. Her hairless skull is smooth and round, crying out for a soothing touch. And her eyes – her eyes are _ alive_. She’s ablaze with determination to make it through the fire and avenge herself on those who lit it. 

_ Beautiful_, he thinks, knowing that objectively she’s monstrous.

_ We can be monsters together. _ With trembling hands hidden from her view, he wrings out another cold cloth for her forehead.

* * *

The first time he kisses her, he keeps his eyes open through it so he can see the way her ruined face contorts. Scar tissue pulls tight in a grimace. Her beautiful blue eyes brim with tears. But her mouth is soft. They breathe together, both in pain, both alive, and Kylo cradles her bald head with both hands and tilts her chin up to save strain on her weakened neck. 

She’s shaking when they pull apart. No longer even bothering to try and hide her frailty from him. ‘Ren,’ she says in her hoarse, ashy voice. ‘There’s something seriously wrong with you. Look at me. _ Look _at me.’

‘I am looking at you.’ His lips tingle where they touched hers. Pleasant shudders are rolling down his spine, shaking loose years of loneliness and baked-on pain. ‘I already told you – you have nothing to hide.’

‘I want my mask back.’

‘You can have it.’ It took Kylo a long time to gain the courage to greet the world bare-faced. He’ll need to be patient with Phasma. ‘When you’re out there again, commanding your troops, you can have it. But not with me. With me, you only ever show your true face.’

The next time he kisses her, her lips part for him. Teeth clash and passions flare, and rich salt coats his tongue from the tears that roll freely down her cheeks.

* * *

Outside the medical bay, war rages on. The last surviving dregs of the Resistance are congealing, coming together, forming into a thick layer of scum that will all too soon become Kylo’s problem once again. He feels fluctuations in the Force as his last failed effort to show compassion rallies her strength and trains so she can come back and bite the hand that tried so hard to feed her. His fleet is rebuilding, repairing their ships and replacing their losses in preparation for the next inevitable clash.

There are conquered worlds to hold, and rebel worlds to subdue, and endless borders to patrol. The First Order is stronger than it’s ever been, and with strength comes responsibility and an ever-growing weight to carry. Hux’s coup is still brewing in the command room. Kylo’s many doubters and detractors are still maneuvering against him in what they think are the shadows on the edge of his view. He sees them like enemy troops under a floodlight. They’re no threat to him, not really. They’ll get what’s coming once they make their move.

But it’s a lot of stress to carry.

By the time his work is over each night, Kylo is so tired that he’s ready to crawl back to his quarters and collapse on the bed. He doesn’t. He saves the very last of his strength for Phasma, and in the sanctuary of her ward he finds a new kind of rest that’s deeper and more restorative than anything sleep can do for him.

Day by day, under his care, her strength recovers. She’ll be out of bed soon. Until that happens, Kylo doesn’t want to miss a single tender moment of her convalescence. 

Because as hard as the ordeal has been for Phasma, it’s what brought the two of them together. It’s what stripped away her mask and opened her heart and allowed them to connect on a soul-deep level. Phasma is the only person on board Kylo’s flagship who truly knows what it is to burn.

For now, he soothes her with the balm of his unflinching devotion. He kisses her all over her head and face and mottled neck. He strokes beneath her hospital gown and finds skin that’s still whole and untouched by the flames, still soft with unscorched hair and slick with willingness. He fucks her slowly, deeply, careful of her wounds, and he never once closes his eyes when he comes, the sight of her etched deep into his retinas and glazed with oxytocin.

She’s monstrous. She’s beautiful.

She’s _ his. _


End file.
